Regular meters are typically used in houses to measure the use of gas, electricity, water and other consumer products which are billed per used volume. For instance electricity is typically billed per kilowatt hour, water and gas per cubic meter, etc. The regular meters merely measure the use and display the amount used on a dial or display. A consumer, or a representative of the company which supplies the goods such as an electricity supplier has to perform a reading of that number at given points in time in order to monitor the consumption by the customer. The problem with such an approach is that it is very time consuming to obtain the meter values for all the customers of a large supplier and that either customers have to perform the readings themselves and report to the supplier or that the supplier needs a large number of representatives to perform the readings.
An alternative to the regular meters, is the use of smart meters which are able to communicate to the supplier. This way the supplier can obtain the meter value from each customer with little or no human interaction. The American patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,894,422 discloses a smart meter/billing system wherein smart meters are used to provide information to the supplier about the use of electric power by the customer. The patent describes the measurement of consumption per unit of time correlated to calendar-time, the demand for electric power, reliability, etc by the smart meters and then providing such information to the supplier. The supplier is then able to use information such as the consumption per unit of time at a particular calendar-time for billing purposes. It enables the supplier to charge a given price for the electricity based on the price of production at that specific calendar-time. By monitoring the demand for electricity and providing such information to the supplier, it is possible to take that information into account for billing as well. In addition such information can be used to perform load balancing on the electricity grid. For instance if the demand in a particular area rises, it can be detected by the measured demand of the smart meters in that particular area.
By enabling the supplier to take demand and production costs into account while billing for consumption, it becomes possible to move away from a business model wherein a fixed price is set for the consumption of electricity. However, this means that a customer is no longer aware of the current price of electricity, which may lead to unexpected bills and disputes between the customers and the suppliers. In order to avoid such problems, the suppliers may use a system which provides current price information to the customers.
An example of such system is disclosed in a US patent application US 2007/0136217 A1. In this patent application the distributor has two channels of providing price information to a terminal located at the consumer's premises. The terminal is able to display the price information and may control the power supply to various appliances based on the current price and other rules defined by the consumer. For instance the terminal may be able to switch an appliance on when the price is below a threshold but take into account the current time of day to avoid disturbance during the night.
The advantage of the above described solutions is that they no longer require a significant human effort to provide measurements to suppliers. Instead such information can be provided automatically or upon request by the smart meters. Although these solutions have been described with respect to electricity, the general concept of frequent measurements related to a given calendar-time, measurement of demand and providing price information to the consumer can be applied to any type of product, thus also water, gas, fuel, etc. However even when these solutions are applied to other fields of consumer products, their functionality is limited to measuring the consumption, the billing of consumption and providing pricing information to the user.
The prior art solutions are however limited in their functionality and cannot handle extensive business models or more complex tasks involving one or more smart meters. The prior art solutions are limited to reading information from a smart meter and processing that information for billing or load balancing and to provide pricing information to the customers.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a way of managing and monitoring smart meters which is more flexible. It is another objective of the present invention to provide a way of performing complex tasks involving smart meters. It is another objective of the present invention to provide a more secure use of smart meters.